I’ve just received some more promotional coupon codes for Google AdWords. Each coupon is worth about 50 USD, and to celebrate this new decade of endless possibilities, I’m giving them all up for nothing more than the right price: Totally Free!

The coupons are good for new users, and will only work with AdWords accounts that are less than 14 days old.

UPDATE (May 01, 2010): All coupons have been handed out. Sorry I didn’t have enough for everyone, see you next time! :)

To get your free code you’ll need to do two things:

1. Link to this post from your blog (it must be a legitimate blog, e.g. not spam!).

2.Go here and fill in your name, email address, and a link to your blog.

I will send you the coupon via email within a 24 hours time, come and get it!

Please note:
1. In order to use the coupon you must be new to Google AdWords. This means that your account must be 14 days old or less!
2. You must use the coupon you get. You can’t pass it to someone else, keep it unused, publish it online, etc. If you don’t use it, tell me and I will give it to someone else!
3. After you’ve used up the coupon, you must manually stop your AdWords campaign if you wish to discontinue it.
4. The marked value of the coupon is 200 NIS, actual value in USD may vary.
5. Coupon giveaway will only continue while supplies last – hurry up!
6. All invalid requests will be ignored.

To get your free promotional code Click Here and request a coupon – I will email it to you within 24h time!

You can use these coupons to start up your Google advertising campaign and to pay the Google AdWords registration fees (at least at google.co.il where such fees apply). Please note that the promotional code is intended for NEW AdWords accounts only and needs to be applied when you create your account (or a short time afterwards).

How to get the free Google AdWords Coupun?

Step 1: Make sure that you’re new to Google AdWords, or that your account is only a few days old.

Step 2: Do at least one of the following: Put hillelstoler.wordpress.com in your blogroll or link to this post from your blog and help me spread the word about the free coupons.

Step 3: Just ask for it!
I will send your promotional code ASAP (usually within less than 24h).

A note for Wiz clients & GetSocial users
If you’re an active Wiz client or if you’ve ever made a donation for GetSocial (prior to September 22, 2009) you are invited to contact me and receive your free coupon without the need to link here.

(Some of) the fine print:
1. You must be new to Google AdWords. This means that your account must be 14 days old or less (and that’s the 3rd time I’ve said that already!).

2. You must use the coupon you get. You can’t pass it to someone else, keep it unused, publish it online, etc.

3. After you’ve used up the coupon, you must manually stop your AdWords campaign if you wish to discontinue it.

At this point I would like to make it clear that I receive no profit out of these coupons or from Google. It’s a strictly humanitarian act :)

When creating donationware (Free and fully functional product that does not require payment, but instead requests a donation) your success depends on many factors, ranging from the quality and spread of your product to the current state of the economy. A key issue in getting donations is to know the right amount to ask for.

You can always leave it to the potential donor to decide how much money he wants to donate, but doing so will lead to an additional step in the process of making the donation, which will require the donor to make another decision (how much to donate). This might be a chance for the donor to revert his original decision of making a donation in the first place! He or she might think: I’m not sure how much I want to donate, this is too much money/not enough money/not exactly what I wanted – “I’ll think about it and come back later”. We seldom do that, don’t we?

If you decide to request a fixed amount and using PayPal to collect your donations, you should consider how much of your donation money will actually get to you after PayPal takes all its commissions.

I’ve prepared this graph (ranging from donations of 1.00 to 100.00 USD), which illustrates the amount of money in percents PayPal will take for each donation amount. Naturally, when you ask for more money you will get to keep a higher percentage of each donation, however it will become harder to raise them in the first place!

This graph is based on data from PayPal for a premiere account (where transactions from people using PayPal and credit cards have the same commission rates). You pay PayPal a fixed 0.30 USD for each donation, plus an additional 3.4% (for a monthly transaction volume smaller than 3,000 USD).

You can observe a rapid drop in the fraction eaten by PayPal for each additional dollar up until around 5.00 USD (this is our 10% commission mark), after that we get a nice curve up until about 20.00 USD where the commission rate is reduced in half to about 5%, and from there it’s a linear decline with a very small slope (which means that from this point, asking for more money will have almost no effect on the commission).

I have concluded that our preferred work area should be the curve, with donation requests ranging from 5.00 to 20.00 USD.